Jean-Marie Gankou Fowagap, Magali Duchel Mandio Abomo
Against intensifying climate risks, this study compares the associations of sectoral, cross-sectoral, and international climate policies with annual changes in adaptation readiness. Using an unbalanced panel of 59 countries from 2002 to 2022, it estimates OLS and SUR models with policy–income interactions and assesses robustness through Mundlak and dynamic GMM specifications. Cross-sectoral policies display the most consistent positive association with readiness improvements, although Wald tests show no statistically significant difference between their coefficients and those of sectoral policies. The two approaches therefore appear complementary rather than substitutable. International policies are mainly associated with improvements in lower-income countries, and their contribution weakens as income rises. The findings emphasize cross-sectoral coordination, sector-specific expertise, sustained implementation, and strategies adapted to national economic and institutional capacities.
Nicoleta Barbuta-Misu, Puiu Lucian Georgescu, Monica Laura Zlati, Costinela Fortea, Valentin Marian Antohi
Energy and resource sustainability in the European Union cannot be represented adequately by a single ranking or by isolated relationships between individual indicators. Member States combine different levels of energy use, innovation effort, material throughput, emissions, resource productivity, and waste generation. Such combinations generate structural regimes that can persist even while overall cross-country dispersion declines. This study examines those regimes and their temporal evolution across the EU-27 during 2010–2023. A balanced panel of 378 Member State-year observations was assembled from Eurostat using six indicators: primary energy consumption, gross domestic expenditure on research and development, raw material consumption, domestic net greenhouse gas emissions, resource productivity, and municipal waste generation. All clustering variables were z -standardized before K-Means estimation. Candidate solutions from k = 2 to k = 10 were evaluated using within-cluster sum of squares, silhouette coefficient, Calinski-Harabasz index, Davies-Bouldin index, Gap Statistic, cluster-size structure, and resampling stability. Robustness was examined through an unstandardized specification, Yeo-Johnson transformation, 1st−99th percentile winsorization, and RobustScaler preprocessing. Country-year mobility, sigma-convergence, and beta-convergence were then analyzed separately from the clustering step. Joint validation supported a four-cluster primary specification rather than the previously imposed three-cluster structure. Cluster 1 represents a lower-intensity resource and innovation profile and contains 59.26% of observations. Cluster 2 combines stronger innovation and resource productivity with higher waste and emissions. Cluster 3 combines very high R&D and material consumption with comparatively low net greenhouse gas emissions. Cluster 4 captures a persistent high-intensity energy, emissions, and resource profile. Standardized and unstandardized partitions showed very low agreement (ARI = 0.135), confirming strong scale distortion in the raw metric space. Winsorization reproduced the baseline partition almost exactly (ARI = 0.981). Only 3 of 351 adjacent-year transitions changed cluster, producing 99.15% persistence. Multivariate RMS distance to the annual EU centroid declined by 14.45% and the beta-convergence coefficient was −0.0358 (p < 0.001). Resource productivity nevertheless displayed significant divergence, while R&D dispersion showed no significant linear convergence. EU energy-resource sustainability is therefore characterized by persistent structural regimes combined with measurable convergence inside the system. Convergence does not occur mainly through widespread movement between clusters. It occurs through declining multivariate distances while most countries remain within stable structural profiles. Results support differentiated policy design, because innovation capacity, material intensity, resource productivity, energy use, and environmental pressure do not improve synchronously. Methodological findings also show that scale correction, explicit k-selection, resampling stability, and panel-aware temporal diagnostics are necessary for defensible sustainability clustering.
Joana Díaz-Pont, Queralt Plana, Sandra Casas, Xavier Martinez
Mediterranean coastal regions face increasingly interconnected climate risks that require adaptation across sectors and governance levels. Despite growing policy commitments and a widening portfolio of adaptation initiatives, implementation often remains fragmented. This study examines the governance conditions under which diverse climate adaptation initiatives can be integrated to support coordinated regional and local resilience. Using the Catalan coast (Spain) as a case study, the analysis draws on nine adaptation initiatives developed through the European IMPETUS project. These initiatives are interpreted through four response types used as analytical lenses—technological, ecological, social-behavioral, and policy-integrated—and analyzed using a governance diagnostic framework based on five governance dimensions: mandates and responsibilities, coordination mechanisms, funding structures, planning and regulatory embedding, and implementation capacity. The IMPETUS Catalonia demonstration provides a common empirical setting for the analysis, drawing on the documentary, technical, implementation, and stakeholder material generated around the nine initiatives. The findings identify institutional alignment across governance dimensions as an important condition supporting or constraining adaptation integration. Technological initiatives show stronger alignment with established mandates, funding arrangements, and implementation capacity. Ecological and social-behavioral initiatives face greater coordination and long-term embedding challenges. Policy-integrated characteristics are present across all initiatives yet primarily support the implementation of individual initiatives rather than stronger connections among different adaptation approaches. Overall, adaptation objectives are increasingly embedded within planning and decision-making processes while technological, ecological, and social-behavioral initiatives continue to evolve in parallel. The study contributes a governance diagnostic framework for analyzing adaptation integration and shows how institutional alignment helps identify governance conditions that support or constrain integration. The framework offers an approach for diagnosing governance barriers and strengthening more coordinated climate adaptation in Mediterranean coastal regions.
A comprehensive understanding of changing climate patterns and flood hazard dynamics is essential for effective climate change adaptation. One of the European Union's Horizon 2020 IMPETUS project demonstrator regions, Zemgale (Latvia), located in the Boreal biogeographic region of Northern Europe, is particularly vulnerable to flooding due to its flat agricultural landscapes, dense river network, and extensive floodplains. Under climate change, spring river flood regimes are being altered by earlier snow and ice melt, as well as by increasing heavy rainfall intensity, which heightens flash flood risks in urban areas. This study aimed to develop climate change adaptation pathways to improve regional preparedness for both river floods and heavy rainfall-induced flash floods through a co-design and co-creation process involving stakeholders from multiple governance levels, with the support of a risk reduction modeling team to establish alternatives for assessment. Adaptation options were identified and evaluated using multi-criteria analysis, considering, among others, effectiveness, costs, co-benefits, feasibility, and additional criteria. A set of structural and non-structural measures, including conventional approaches and innovative nature-based solutions, were selected to address rapid increases in river water levels and intense rainfall events. These measures were subsequently sequenced into adaptation pathways to respond to flood-related hazards and impacts, enhancing adaptive capacity and reducing vulnerability in both rural and urban areas of the Zemgale region under future climate conditions. To identify and evaluate alternative adaptation pathways, the Dynamic Contingency Response Tool (DCRT) was used. Modeling was conducted for three climate change and development scenarios (SSP1, SSP2, and SSP5), utilizing risk projections derived from the Risk Emerging and Problems Inference Engine (REPIE) tool. The outcomes of the risk analysis were discussed with stakeholders and considered in the development of the Zemgale Regional Climate Change Adaptation Plan.
Eveling Sussety Balcazar-Paiva, Carlos Enrique Alarcon-Eche, Alexander Fernando Haro-Sarango
Spillovers and co-movements among crude oil, gold, and equity markets sit at the heart of portfolio diversification, hedging, energy-risk assessment, and financial-stability policy. This systematic review, reported in accordance with the PRISMA 2020 guidelines and adapted to a bibliometric evidence-synthesis design, maps how that field is built intellectually, synthesizes what its empirical literature has established, identifies where its newest fronts lie, and situates it against prior bibliometric reviews. The review question was framed with a PICOS structure; the corpus comprises 1,081 unique documents drawn from Web of Science and Scopus under a PRISMA 2020 selection flow. The search window is 2010–2026 and the analytical window 2010–2025 (n = 1,077): the four 2026 Early Access records are excluded from every statistic that depends on publication year, and their removal from the remaining analyses moves no reported share by more than 0.4 percentage points. Within the strictly defined crude oil–gold–equity triad this is, to our knowledge, the most extensive corpus assembled so far—about 58% larger than the closest triad-focused comparator—and the first to treat the three assets jointly rather than as separate dyads. We combine performance analysis with complementary science-mapping techniques: co-occurrence of lemmatized keywords with Louvain community detection (γ = 1.0; Q = 0.231), author co-citation, bibliographic coupling confined to 2022–2025, and country-level co-authorship, with normalized indicators (h-index, g-index, citations per document per year, and the MCP/SCP ratio). Output grew at a 27.4% compound annual rate over 2010–2024 and then leveled off from 2023 (year-over-year rates of 4.1%, 0.0%, and −3.4%). Keyword co-occurrence resolves into four thematic clusters; author co-citation into three intellectual schools (safe haven/GARCH, connectedness/Diebold–Yilmaz, and COVID/crypto/alternative havens); and bibliographic coupling into nine emerging fronts, among them a small green bonds and energy-transition front that earlier reviews do not register. Latin America and the Caribbean account for at most 1.76% of corpus documents while supplying 9.5% of world commodity exports, a representation ratio of 0.19. The findings inform diversification and hedging strategies, regulatory debates on the financialization of energy and commodity markets, the emerging interface between fossil-energy assets and green finance, and regional research agendas.
